Personally, I cannot see why the hell they dropped CFSTUDIO?
I think this has been explained before but, even tho' it's not really related to CFCs, I'll reiterate:
Allaire had HomeSite, JRun Studio and CF Studio which were all based on the same core code and written in Delphi - and therefore ran only on Windows.
Macromedia had Dreamweaver and UltraDev which also had a common parent code base but were written in C++ - and therefore ran on both Mac and Windows.
Basic economics determined that the we couldn't continue to support five products that all, at heart, were doing fairly similar things. Favoring Dreamweaver was the obvious choice given that it had the lion's share of the professional HTML editor market and was a fairly competent code-editing tool. UltraDev already had ColdFusion support so it made sense to merge UltraDev and Dreamweaver and add as much of CF Studio's functionality as possible.
Accepting that DWMX was not yet a 100% replacement for CF Studio, the latter is bundled with DWMX as HomeSite+ (the renamed and updated version of CF Studio) for $100 less than CF Studio used to cost.
Ben Forta ran a BoF session at DevCon 2002 about CF IDEs asking for input and explaining all of this history. DWMX will get better and better for CF development so, hopefully, even the most die-hard CF Studio fan will eventually be won over. FWIW, I tried using CFS4.5 and CFS5 and hated them both - so I went back to DW4 for my CF coding. Now, on the Mac, DWMX is the natural choice, especially with the Web Services and Components 'wizards'.
- Try doing a CFINCLUDE on a .js file and see what happens (or any other file thats got a non .cfm extension),
Hmm, I haven't noticed a problem with that - what are you seeing?
- Shortcut keys don't bind to nominated tags even though the application says it does (ie i always bounded CTRL + O to cfoutput
I guess I'm a fast enough typist that I never use shortcuts :)
- Snippets are just useless, as there is an overload on panels as is, but to get to snippets you have limited realestate. Furthermore you can't bind keys to these snippets (loved that feature the most in > CFS).
I hear quite a few people complain about this and I know the DW product team are aware of those complaints. I've never used 'snippets' in any code editor I've ever worked with. What sort of things do folks use this feature for?
- Expression Builder, I used this heaps mainly for a quick insight into function / tags but to also "draw formulas". Used this one the most in CFS.
What does this feature do? I've never used such a feature in any IDE I've ever used.
- File / Explorer style access. While I love DWMX's abilities to create "site definitions" I still find it annoying that you have this fumbled solution in that to access files on the hard drive you first have to define a site!
DWMX lets you explore the hard drive for any files you want and it's easy enough to set up a simple, default, local site that points to the root of your CF workarea with no remote or testing site defined if you want. Again, it seems to be a common complaint from CF Studio users that even one site is required and the DW product team are aware of that complaint.
Secondly, if you have gone to the trouble of seperating your GUI elements into directory structures (ie Backgrounds, Icons, Photos, SWFs etc) the assets folder dumps them all as one big output assuming you already know the name of the graphics (on a large website this is a tedious excercise).
Well, on this one I'll agree with you :) I admit that I don't find the Assets panel at all useful.
If you're building a CF application that uses Web Services, the Web Service explorer / wizard in DWMX is very useful. If you're whiteboarding a CFC-based application, the Components wizard can also be pretty useful and saves a *lot* of typing! I actually find the site definition feature to be extremely useful as I have multiple CF installations on my machine and keep track of all the source code in a separate directory under CVS. I can define several sites, where the "local" site is in the CVS check-in/-out area, the "testing" site is one of the instances on my local machine and the "remote" site is one of the shared development servers. It's a very convenient, organized way to work.
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood
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